As public safety and organizational missions become increasingly larger, joint operations between agencies is becoming more common. Existing barriers to interoperable communications are quickly being removed and cooperation between agencies during operations is increasing. Therefore, the need to be able to identify and communicate with key contact personnel during an operation, especially during interagency operations, is becoming increasingly important.
In many situations, individuals or groups may not have prior knowledge of the identity or contact information of a specific agency, task group, or individual with whom they need to communicate. This could be the case, for example, during incident or event scene management, or even during planned operations. This is especially the case when specific key contacts involved in an operation changes over time even though the roles played by the key contacts involved in the operation remain the same.
In situations such as these, individuals and groups need a way, in real-time, to obtain the identity and contact information of other agencies, task groups or individual key contacts involved in the operation, and also to provide their own identity and contact information to others as appropriate. The mechanisms which accomplish this should be as automatic as possible in order to minimize the burden placed on the user.
Although users may not know each other by name, users will generally be familiar with the role of everyone with whom they need to communicate. For example, users may know that a crew commander is the key contact person during a fire, but the particular person who is filling or playing the role of crew commander for that operation may be unknown.
Therefore, a dynamic communications directory which identifies users and groups by their operational role, and which uses the role assignments to provide a role-appropriate communications directory to a user or group's communication device(s) would enable efficient communications between users and groups who may not otherwise have each other's contact information.
Skilled artisans will appreciate that elements in the figures are illustrated for simplicity and clarity and have not necessarily been drawn to scale. Also, common, but well-understood elements that are useful or necessary in a commercially feasible embodiment are not often depicted in order to facilitate a less obstructed view of these various embodiments of the present disclosure. It will be further appreciated that certain actions and/or steps may be described or depicted in a particular order of occurrence while those skilled in the art will understand that such specificity with respect to sequence is not actually required. It will also be understood that the terms and expressions with respect to their corresponding respective areas of inquiry and study except where specific meaning have otherwise been set forth herein.